LLNL’s Gamblin named to HPCwire’s 'People to Watch' list for 2024

The high performance computing (HPC) publication HPCwire has selected Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory computer scientist Todd Gamblin as one of its “People to Watch” in HPC for 2024.

A distinguished member of technical staff in Livermore Computing, Gamblin is best known in the HPC community for creating Spack, a popular open source HPC package management tool that won an R&D 100 Award in 2019. Spack has grown to involve more than 1,300 contributors from more than 300 organizations and was the official deployment tool for the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project. Spack has also become the package manager of choice for supercomputers around the world.

In addition to leading the Spack project, Gamblin is a co-founder of the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF), a Linux Foundation project umbrella currently in the formation stage. The foundation is expected to launch in May, and seeks to build, promote and advance a portable software stack for HPC by supporting and encouraging adoption of key HPC open source software projects.

Now in its 22nd year, HPCwire’s People to Watch program celebrates HPC professionals who “play leading roles in driving innovation within their particular fields, making significant contributions to society as a whole,” according to the publication’s website.

"I am honored and humbled to be recognized by HPCwire as one of their People to Watch for 2024,” Gamblin said. “This honor is a testament to the collective efforts of myself and my team, collaborators on HPSF, Livermore Computing and the entire Spack community. I am proud to be featured among the luminaries on this list and acknowledged alongside them as champions for innovation in the field of HPC."

The 12 professionals selected for the 2024 list are at the forefront of trends such as generative artificial intelligence, advances in processors, cooling/packaging designs, energy efficiency and quantum computing, “adapting new technology to our rapidly changing world in order to unlock the answers to the biggest societal challenges of our time and make the impossible, possible,” according to HPCwire.

Gamblin began his career at LLNL in 2008. He received an Early Career Research Award from the Department of Energy in 2014 and the LLNL Director’s Science & Technology Award in 2020. In addition to the R&D 100 award, the Spack project won an HPCwire Editor’s Choice award in 2023.

Gamblin is a long-time advocate for software developers and open source both inside and outside of LLNL. He also has led the Packaging Technologies Project for the Exascale Computing Project, LLNL’s DevRAMP project on developer productivity and BUILD, a Lab Strategic Initiative on automated software integration. His research interests include dependency management, open source, software engineering, parallel computing, performance measurement and performance analysis.